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MONTREAL — Too many cooks, as the enduring proverb goes, spoil the broth.

But there were more than 200 cooks involved in testing and selecting the recipes for a new Montreal cookbook — and the results are stellar.

The title is a mouthful (excuse the food reference): Women’s Philanthropy Mosaic: A Cookbook Celebrating Montreal’s Jewish Culinary Diversity. It’s an initiative of the Women’s Philanthropy division of Federation CJA, an umbrella organization of Jewish agencies.

Proceeds from the sale of the book, which costs $50, will help vulnerable women in the community. And the women involved with the cookbook will be involved in deciding how the funds are allocated. But more on that in a minute.

The 110 recipes do, indeed, reflect the diversity of a community made up of Sephardi Jews, whose roots run deep in the countries of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe, and Ashkenazi Jews, whose origins are in Eastern Europe. Represented among Montreal’s nearly 90,000 Jews are those from countries including Iran and Egypt, Greece and Russia, Argentina and Israel.

“In a mosaic, each piece retains its own unique shape but forms part of a greater whole,” the book’s foreword says, in part. “Similarly, in our Montreal cuisine, divergent styles, spices and customs emanating from communities of different origin come together to create a unique mosaic of recipes.”

That mosaic of recipes includes everything from wild mushrooms on polenta and roasted sea bass Provençale with garlic spinach to pappardelle with Tunisian short rib ragout and lamb kefta.

A chicken recipe featuring honey and chopped dried apricots in its ingredient list would be a fine choice for a Rosh Hashanah table: The two-day celebration of the Jewish new year begins on Sept. 4 at sundown and it is customary to eat foods sweetened with honey — an expression of hope for a sweet year.

The meal could begin with a roasted vegetable soup from the book calling for carrots, butternut squash and parsnips, all from the sweet end of the vegetable spectrum. And it could end with a South American apple pie featuring honey, cinnamon and apricot jam.

“I consider myself very fortunate for my background — second-generation Venezuelan, granddaughter of Polish grandparents on my dad’s side and Moroccan grandparents on my mom’s side,” wrote the woman who submitted the pie recipe. “The best of all worlds were always served at our table.”

But one needn’t be Jewish to enjoy such a meal. And some of the recipes, it should be said, have nothing to do with the Jewish community: Think Sichuan salmon or East Asian fish flavoured with lemon grass and coconut milk. But they all have this going for them: They were selected, tested and retested by women who understand food and know how to cook, they are clearly laid out and easy to follow and, in most cases, they occupy no more than a single page.

Gail Adelson-Marcovitz, who was president of Women’s Philanthropy when the cookbook project was undertaken, explained that it was intended as a way to engage and involve women who had not previously been a part of the organized community.

“We realized that nurturing through food relationships is important for many women,” she said one recent morning. “So we used food to reach out to community.”

The goal of the cookbook is to raise funds to help vulnerable women within the community — and also to engage the women involved with the project in deciding how to allocate those funds.

“We are inviting everyone who has purchased a book to be involved in the discussion about how the money is spent,” said Adelson-Marcovitz, one of five so-named Top Chefs at the helm of the project, with Etty Bienstock, Rhonda Leibner, Debby Newpol and Heather Paperman.

“We want people to feel involved from start to finish,” Paperman said. “It is an opportunity to see something from its inception to where it is ultimately helping people.”

A call for recipes that had been in the family for generations, for instance, or reflected people’s country of origin went out to those on the Federation CJA mailing list; about 1,000 were submitted.

There was a measure of duplication and overlap and some recipes clearly came directly from other cookbooks or were not usable for other reasons. Ultimately, the five women narrowed the original submissions down to about 250 recipes.

At that point, the recipes were tested and evaluated by another group of volunteers, dubbed Master Chefs and Sous Chefs, some of whom were recruited and others who heard about the project and wanted to get involved. Based on their recommendations, another, smaller, group of women, the Iron Chefs and the Top Chefs, tested the recipes again, “and based on that,” said Top Chef Bienstock, “we walked away with recipes we loved.”

The Top Chefs tested the 110 recipes that had made the cut, cooking three to four days per week last summer in each other’s homes and preparing about 15 recipes a day. They worked together well — “There was no drama,” as Newpol observed — as they cooked and tasted; often they made lunch of what they’d cooked, sometimes taking food home to feed their families.

And when it was time last September for the photo shoot with photographer Jean Longpré, they shopped for ingredients at Jean Talon Market and cooked the dishes once again at his nearby studio. The shoot took place over a period of about a month, and they worked, two at a time, preparing from 10 to 15 recipes in a single day.

The cost of the book, which has an initial print run of 5,000, was underwritten by Mitzi Dobrin and Leesa Steinberg as tributes to their mothers, Helen Roth Steinberg and Gertrude Dover Steinberg, so all proceeds will go directly to help vulnerable women. And Women’s Philanthropy now has an allocations committee, tasked with deciding how the money is to be spent.

Women’s Philanthropy Mosaic can be ordered online at www.mosaiccookbook.com. It is also available at several Montreal locations, including: the branches of Linen Chest at Promenades Cathédrales, the Rockland Centre and the Riocan Centre Kirkland; Bibliophile, 5519 Queen Mary Rd.; Jack & Jill, 5330 Queen Mary Rd.; Joshua­DAVID, 4926 Sherbrooke St. W.; Caldwell Provisions Inc., 7025 Kildare Rd.; Kidlink Books & Toys, 5604 Monkland Ave.; Le Colorbox, 1333 St-Jacques St. W., Spa de Westmount, 1 Westmount Square. Women’s Philanthropy Mosaic has a Facebook page. A free App, which can be downloaded to the iPhone through the App Store, features a photo and ingredient list for every recipe.

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